Jonathan Sternberg Followed the Music

Or, why the Bach Festival gave in to the unreasonable demands of one wily conductor

by Peter Burwasser

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Published: Mar 4, 2008

Michael T. Regan

"There's no end to my stories."

This self-referential comment by conductor Jonathan Sternberg ranks as one of the most amusing understatements I can recall. It came at about the one-and-a-half-hour point of our chat about his remarkable career, and we had not yet broken into the 1950s. But after all, this is a man who, at the age of 88, seems to have crammed several lifetimes into one, and he's far from done.

Sternberg's experience in Philadelphia is but the latest of those lifetimes. He came here in 1971, lured from Eastman School of Music to head the Temple University orchestra program, and was a professor there until his retirement in 1989. He was also the conductor of the Main Line Symphony, the Doctors Orchestra and the Symphony Club. He is currently artistic director of the Bach Festival of Philadelphia, a position he was reluctant to accept.

"It should have gone to someone half my age. I made a number of unreasonable demands about budget and rehearsal time, thinking that would get me off the hook, but they accepted anyway." And he retains a voracious appetite for all kinds of music, supporting local musicians and composers with an ardor that should put many younger music consumers to shame. The pony-tailed, leather-jacketed bon vivant is a familiar figure in the arena of live concert music, from the Kimmel Center to NoLibs new-music hipster salons.

As he recalls his biography, especially the early days, it's clear that Sternberg was destined for a life in music. As a teenager in New York in the 1930s, the unabashed smart-aleck and musical sponge would go on the radio quiz show Symphonic Varieties (later called So You Think You Know Music), winning records and often correcting the host.

"It's how I started my 78 rpm collection. Eventually, I became a judge on the show. People thought Judge Sternberg was 70 years old." He took a nonpaying "job" as a music critic, and attended an impossible number of concerts ("nine a week, two on Saturday and Sunday"), and managed to slip into rehearsal sessions of some of the most important figures of 20th-century music, including Toscanini and Walter. His parents gave him violin lessons, but expected him to follow in his father's path and become a physician. It was not until his first report card was sent home from NYU that they discovered he had enrolled as a music major, to their horror. "The traditional Jewish thought about musicians is that I would be out on the street playing the fiddle for pennies."

A compromise was worked out, and Sternberg studied music education. He did not relish the prospect of teaching bored school kids, but soon enough, an unusual opportunity arose (i.e., somebody died), and he was, at the age of 17 and a half, teaching at the college level. He became involved in youth orchestras, including one directed by Leopold Stokowski. "Stokie was never going to give me a shot at conducting. I finally got the chance, as the orchestra was disbanding, and made my first appearance as a conductor in front of an audience, performing the 'Outdoor Overture' of Copland. The date was Dec. 7, 1941."

Young Sternberg entered the Army the following year, eventually enrolling in officer training school. After a stint with the Irving Berlin show This Is the Army on Broadway, off he went to Calcutta, via Australia, and landing, finally, in post-Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

When the conductor of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra was discovered to be a Japanese collaborator, he was promptly canned, and, at age 26, Sternberg took over. By his own admission, he learned on the job. "I had no experience. I just beat the time."

After his discharge, he returned to New York and promptly pointed himself toward Europe to polish his craft. "There was no such thing as American conductors in those days." After a brief stop in Prague, he ended up in Vienna in 1947, his home for the next decade. Although prejudice against "uncultured Americans" should have slowed him down, dollars went a long way on the black market, and he was soon collaborating with some of the finest musicians of the day, including singers Walter Berry, and Lisa dellaCasa, pianists Alfred Brendel and Paul Badura-Skoda, and cellist Maurice Gendron. He also gave the first European performances of the by-then-famous Bach-Stokowski orchestral transcriptions, a real coup, made possible by his friendship with the American publishers of the scores, the Broude brothers. As Sternberg still proudly recalls, "The house was sold out."

It was at this time that Sternberg befriended another Army vet by the name of H.C. Robbins Landon, who would go on to become one of the most important classical scholars of his generation. His Haydn Society engaged Sternberg to make a series of recordings, which were some of the first LPs. Next came the Bach Guild recordings, a pioneering series that was an important part of the great Bach revival (still available on Vanguard reissues). Sternberg figures that he has about 50 commercially released recordings to his name.

In Vienna, Sternberg matured as an artist. He came under the sway of legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwaengler, to this day his strongest influence. Furtwaengler was a controversial figure, on and off the podium. He had a tortured relationship with the Nazi regime, which he detested, but because he continued to conduct in Berlin, including at an infamous birthday concert for Hitler, he was blacklisted after the war. Even after official "denazification," many famous musicians refused to play with him.

"His secretary told me he stayed in Germany because of his close attachment to his illegitimate children. But he also felt a moral obligation to use music as a means of keeping the spirit of the German people alive during a terrible time." Sternberg was amongst a minority faction, albeit an intensely passionate one, which followed Furtwaengler's motivation, with an essential belief in the power of spontaneous inspiration. "He told me that when he conducted, it was as if he was composing. It was never the same way twice. The score is like a road map. You can take the shortest path, or you can get someplace through the mountains, or by sea."

In a grand sweep of the musical 20th century, Sternberg also counts the polymath Rumanian George Enescu and the supremely classicist pianist Artur Schnabel as great influences. He took private lessons with conductor Pierre Monteux and as a lad in New York worked with podium pedagogue Leon Barzin, to whom he credits an essential credo: "It should be possible to rehearse an orchestra without ever opening your mouth." Barzin, who was Belgian and did not speak much English, discovered this by necessity, but the point is that conducting is far more than simply keeping time with a stick. "He said that anyone could conduct an orchestra, because the orchestra will play without you. But if they know you have an interpretation, they will respect your ideas."

(p_burwasser@citypaper.net)

 

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